Info Junkie: Mind feeder

Kate Maehr, 38, is executive director of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, which distributes more than 40 million pounds of food a year to pantries and soup kitchens in Cook County. In addition to a National Public Radio addiction, her media menu includes:

Tribune, Sun-Times and Oak Park's Wednesday Journal. The New York Times' Sunday Styles is "my favorite section of any newspaper in America," especially the profiles of newlyweds in the "Vows" column. "I'm totally riveted when I read them."

Presidential biographies. "I named my dog Truman after (David) McCullough's book." All-time favorite: Robert A. Caro's biography of Lyndon B. Johnson in three long volumes  and counting. "I'm tense, because he's an older man and I don't know if he's going to live to do the final book."

"Leadership as an Art," by Max DePree, chairman emeritus of furniture-maker Herman Miller Inc. "A lot of leadership books are like, Jack Welch: 'I am great. Emulate me and you will be great too.' And Max DePree was a very humble kind of leader."

Reads Harry Potter books to her two young sons for a nightly half-hour  or as long as her voice holds up. "You read for six minutes, and you're like, this is so hard."

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg's "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago," about the 1995 scorcher that left more than 700 Chicagoans dead. "It's about a system that broke, and how all the pieces conspired together to break."